The advent of gigabit-per-second packet networks has focussed the attention of optical network system designers on the need to provide selected users with gigabit-per-second network access together with a high-speed multiplexing system which can be used to access an optical channel. One approach frequently suggested is the use of lower speed channels with wavelength division multiplexing. Unfortunately, since this approach requires dividing or "chopping" the high speed traffic into multiple streams for transmission on several channels, relatively complex traffic synchronization and/or reassembly procedures are required at the receiving end. It is noted that statistical time division multiplexing does not suffer from this disadvantage. It does, however, require electronic switching of multiplexed traffic at the peak channel rate. Switching at this high rate is both complex and expensive because this is the rate at which a line card of a switching node must operate. For example, if the transmission rate of the data is 1 Gbps, the line card must detect and process the packets at 1 Gbps. Very high speed electronics is expensive and the technology is, as yet, not sufficiently mature. Thus, there is a need to avoid the limitations of high speed electronics.